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Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,
And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.
Lo, ’tis autumn
A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,
I.
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.... Near them, on the sand,
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, — mud from a muddy spring;
I am the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and…
Pavement slipp’ry, people sneezing,
Lords in ermine, beggars freezing;
Titled gluttons dainties carving,
‘O Jesus Christ! I’m hit,’ he said; and died.
Whether he vainly cursed, or prayed indeed,
The Bullets chirped — In vain! vain! vain!
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
When Love with unconfinèd wings
Hovers within my Gates,
And my divine Althea brings
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
“Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone,
Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought,
And in the forms of gods and heroes wrought
When I was fair and young, then favor graced me.
Of many was I sought their mistress for to be.
But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore:
I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —
This debt we pay to human guile;
Wife and servant are the same,
But only differ in the name:
For when that fatal knot is tied,
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
